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Op Eds

Zachary Norris argues against undermining the will of California voters by trying to dismantle Proposition 47, a smart policy that will improve public safety and move us towards ending the punishment economy.

Oakland Tribune columnist Tammerlin Drummond argues that Alameda County needs to be more transparent about how it is spending its public safety realignment funding, and questions why the sheriff is still set to get $18 million of the funding when there are fewer inmates under supervision.

Fourteen Black Lives Matter activists were arrested on Black Friday for interrupting BART service. Initially, the Alameda County District Attorney and BART's Board of Directors demanded $70,000 from those activists in victim's restitution payments for lost ridership.

The BART board and the district attorney should heed the call of thousands of people who are calling for the charges against the #BlackFriday14 to be dropped.

How do we go from "hands up, don't shoot" and professional athletes donning "I can't breathe" T-shirts to concrete action that will begin to alter the odious statistic that black teen males are 21 times more likely to be shot by the police than their white peers?

Zachary Norris, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, says young leaders around the country have already begun organizing around issues of inequality. They include the Black Youth Project in Chicago, the Dream Defenders in Florida and Black Lives Matter.

"It's an example of a kind of modern day Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee," Norris said, referring to the student organization that civil rights leader Ella Baker launched to register blacks to vote in the South.

Restorative justice provides an effective alternative to the punishment-focused model that dominates our criminal justice system. Instead of focusing on what laws have been broken, restorative justice brings the victim and the offender together to determine how to repair harm to the survivor and the community, hold the offender accountable, and reduce future harm.

“Indict. Convict. Send the killer cop to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell.” That’s the chant that stuck in my head after going to the Ferguson October protests last month in support of justice for Mike Brown.

I remember marching and saying similar chants for Oscar Grant. Four years ago, Nov. 5, 2010, Officer Johannes Mehserle was sentenced to two years for fatally shooting Oscar Grant in the back as he lay face down on a train platform in Oakland.

Proposition 47 is an example of the kind of “justice reinvestment” initiative that we need nationwide in order to reallocate resources away from mass incarceration and toward education and healthcare. For a long time, California voters have supported the “tough-on-crime” movement, by passing propositions like the three strikes law in 1994. But now, voters are sending the message that being “tough-on-crime” isn’t working, and the rest of the country should follow California’s example.

Despite progress over the last century, for black people this country has failed to ever make good on its earliest and most basic democratic protection: the 14th Amendment. When the 14th Amendment was enacted, it was meant to provide equal protection to all under the law. But if a black person can be gunned down and left in the street for over four hours with no disciplinary action taken against the government representative responsible, what does "equal protection" mean? Redeeming the promise of the 14th Amendment is as relevant today as it was when first enacted.